BRIGID Costello jokes that people may need a massage after watching the Fringe Festival dance production she is directing about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Already, one of the dancers is displaying symptoms scarily like the character she is portraying, who has a fear of germs.
“She says she’s really particular now with cleaning her hands. Hopefully that will calm down after the show finishes,” laughs Costello.
A former Royal New Zealand Ballet dancer, Costello was inspired to devise the production, Thricely? Precisely. A Pocket Full of Pips, after noticing a connection between the repetitive patterns of dancing and OCD.
“We researched a few different types of compulsions – both the traditional ones like checking, and the types we saw as more isolated and lonely - that would be more appropriate for individual dances,” she says.
The production features a pea hoarder, a germophobe and someone with dermatillomania, which is an obsession with skin picking and scratching.
The performers’ dances are obsessive compulsive as well. Instead of traditional 4/4 timing, a whole track is done in seven timing, because three and seven are obsessive numbers in the show (often OCD sufferers have to carry out rituals, such as light-switch flicking, a certain number of times).
“The timing is disconcerting to dance and to watch,” says Costello. “The story is developed from these characters meeting one another and trying to negotiate in the real world.”
She says since she started directing the show, she’s noticed her own obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and thinks most people have their own little rituals to de-stress.
“I do have a few rituals, I’m quite a tidy and organised person,” Costello admits. “When touring in the past I got hassled because I needed my make-up area perfectly in line. Most of the dancers I know have their own set of rituals too. There’s a lot of girls who think ‘if I don’t have my hair done perfectly in the middle of my head, it will affect the way I dance’.”
And if you’re wondering about the name of the production, well that’s OCD too.
Thricely refers to the number three and the title has seven words in it, Precisely alludes to needing perfection, and A Pocket Full of Pips covers the hoarding.
Thricely? Precisely. A Pocket Full of Pips, Photospace Studio, 7pm, Febrary 17 – 27.